Donors increasingly favour complex interventions, but this approach is misguided, says Christopher Charles.
Every year, hundreds of billions of foreign aid dollars are spent on international development and humanitarian assistance. But the return is modest, with relatively little achieved.
Sometimes the metrics (or lack thereof) are to blame. But more often it’s because those interventions weren’t what the target community needed, were too technically complex or costly to maintain, or failed to understand the social and cultural dimensions around implementation and uptake.As a result, aid organisations must constantly defend their presence and the importance of funding.
The answer is to go back to supporting the simple solutions that we know have worked for years.
The three categories of problems
In philosophical communities, and now more commonly in applied science circles, problems are typically broken down into three categories with corresponding analogies. A ‘simple problem’ is analogous to baking a cake: the task is uni-disciplinary, there is a clear pathway to solving the problem and, once the recipe is mastered, one can repeat the process with similar success.
A ‘complicated problem’ might be compared to sending a rocket ship to the moon: the problem is multidisciplinary and requires expert-level teamwork, as well as following step-by-step algorithms. But, once the process is mastered, they too can be repeated with similar success.
Finally, we have ‘complex problems’, the most challenging of all. These include raising a child: there are an infinite number of ways to raise a child, involving multiple players with varying levels of expertise, independence and skills. Crucially, each child is unique, with different needs and wants — and so repeating the steps has no guarantee of success. – SciDev Net
